And lingering over it, when Raza had managed to fight his way through the whirlpools and eddies of young bucks and jealous women surrounding Pinkie Aurangzeb, was the half-drunk Iskander Harappa, city playboy number one, at whom the vision of loveliness was smiling with a warmth that froze the thick perspiration of his arousal on to Raza’s waxed moustache, while that notorious degenerate with his filthy tongue that put even his cousin Mir to shame told the goddess dirty jokes.
Raza Hyder stiff, at embarrassed attention, the garment of his lust rendered rigid by the starch of takallouf … but Isky hiccuped, ‘Look who’s here! Our goddamn hero, the tilyar!’ Pinkie tittered as Iskander adopted a professional stance, adjusting invisible pincenez: ‘The tilyar, madam, as you are possibly aware, is a skinny little migrating bird good for nothing but shooting out of the sky.’ Ripples of laughter spread outwards through the eddying bucks. Pinkie, annihilating Raza with a look, murmured, ‘Pleased to meet,’ and Raza found himself replying with a ruinously awkward and bombastic formality, ‘My honour, lady, and may I say that in my opinion and with the grace of God the new blood is going to be the making of our great new nation,’ but Pinkie Aurangzeb was pretending to stifle a laugh. ‘Fuck me in the mouth, tilyar,’ Iskander Harappa shouted gaily, ‘this is a party, yaar, no mother-fucking speeches, for God’s sake.’ The rage buried beneath Hyder’s good manners was bubbling higher, but it was impotent against this sophistication that permitted obscenity and blasphemy and could murder a man’s desire and his pride with clever laughter. ‘Cousin,’ he attempted catastrophically, ‘I am just a simple soldier,’ but now his hostess stopped pretending not to laugh at him, drew the shawl tighter around her shoulders, put a hand on Iskander Harappa’s arm and said, ‘Take me into the garden, Isky. The air-conditioning is too cold in here, and outside it’s nice and warm.’
‘Then into the warm, pronto!’ Harappa cried gallantly, pressing his glass into Raza’s hand for safe-keeping. ‘For you, Pinkie, I would enter the furnaces of hell, if you desire protection when you get there. My teetotal relative Raza is no less brave,’ he added over his departing shoulder, ‘only he goes to hell not for ladies, but for gas.’
Watching from the sidelines as Iskander Harappa bore his prize away into the close, musky twilight of the garden was the flabby Himalayan figure of our peripheral hero, the doctor, Omar Khayyam Shakil.
Do not form too low an opinion of Atiyah Aurangzeb. She remained faithful to Iskander Harappa even after he turned serious and dispensed with her services, and retired without a word of complaint into the stoic tragedy of her private life, until the day of his death, when after setting fire to an old embroidered shawl she hacked out her own heart with a nine-inch kitchen knife. And Isky, too, was faithful to her in his fashion. From the time that she became his mistress he stopped sleeping with his wife Rani altogether, thus ensuring that she would have no more children, and that he would be the last of his line, an idea which, he told Omar Khayyam Shakil, was not without a certain appeal.
(Here I should explain the matter of daughters-who-should-have-been-sons. Sufiya Zinobia was the ‘wrong miracle’ because her father had wanted a boy; but this was not Arjumand Harappa’s problem. Arjumand, the famous ‘virgin Ironpants’, regretted her female sex for wholly non-parental reasons. ‘This woman’s body,’ she told her father on the day she became a grown woman, ‘it brings a person nothing but babies, pinches and shame.’)
Iskander reappeared from the garden as Raza was preparing to leave, and attempted to make peace. With a formality the equal of Raza’s own, he said: ‘Dear fellow, before you go back to Needle you must come up to Mohenjo; Rani would be so happy. Poor girl, I wish she enjoyed this city life … and I insist that you call your Billoo there also. Let the ladies have a good chat while we shoot tilyars all day long. What do you say?’
And takallouf obliged Raza Hyder to answer: ‘Thank you, yes.’
The day before they passed the sentence of death Iskander Harappa would be permitted to telephone his daughter for one minute exactly. The last words he ever addressed to her in private were acrid with the hopeless nostalgia of those shrunken times: ‘Arjumand, my love, I should have gone out to fight this buffalo-fucker Hyder when he staked himself to the ground. I left that business unfinished; it was my biggest mistake.’
Even in his playboy period Iskander occasionally felt bad about his sequestered wife. At such moments he rounded up a few cronies, bundled them into station-wagons and led a convoy of urban gaiety up to his country estate. Pinkie Aurangzeb was conspicuous by her absence; and Rani was queen for a day.
When Raza Hyder accepted Isky’s invitation to Mohenjo, the two of them drove up together, followed by five other vehicles containing an ample supply of whisky, film starlets, sons of textile magnates, European diplomats, soda siphons and wives. Bilquìs, Sufiya Zinobia and the ayah were met at the private railway station Sir Mir Harappa had constructed on the main line from the capital to Q. And, for one day, nothing bad happened at all.
After the death of Isky Harappa, Rani and Arjumand Harappa were kept locked up in Mohenjo for several years, and to fill the silences the mother told the daughter about the business of the shawl. ‘I had begun to embroider it before I heard that I was sharing my husband with Little Mir’s woman, but it turned out to be a premonition of another woman entirely.’ By that time Arjumand Harappa had already reached the stage of refusing to hear anything bad about her father. She snapped back: ‘Allah, mother, all you can do is bitch about the Chairman. If he did not love you, you must have done something to deserve it.’ Rani Harappa shrugged. ‘Chairman Iskander Harappa, your father, whom I always loved,’ she replied, ‘was world champion of shamelessness; he was international rogue and bastard number one. You see, daughter, I remember those days, I remember Raza Hyder when he was not a devil with horns and a tail, and also Isky, before he became a saint.’
The bad thing that happened at Mohenjo when the Hyders were there was started by a fat man who had had too much to drink. It happened on the second evening of that visit, on the very verandah on which Rani Harappa had gone on with her embroidery while Little Mir’s men looted her home – an incursion whose effects could still be seen, in the empty picture-frames with fragments of canvas adhering to the corners, in the sofas whose stuffing stuck out through the ripped leather, in the odd assortment of cutlery at the dining table and the obscene slogans in the hall, which could still be made out beneath the coats of whitewash. The partial wreckage of the Mohenjo house gave the guests the feeling of holding a celebration in the midst of a disaster, and made them expect more trouble, so that the bright laughter of the film starlet Zehra acquired an edge of hysteria and the men all drank too fast. And all the time Rani Harappa sat in her rocking-chair and worked on her shawl, leaving the organization of Mohenjo to the ayah who was fawning over Iskander as if he were three years old, or a deity, or both. And finally the trouble did come, and because it was the fate of Omar Khayyam Shakil to affect, from his position on the periphery, the great events whose central figures were other people but which collectively made up his own life, it was he who said with a tongue made too loose by the neurotic drinking of the evening that Mrs Bilquìs Hyder was a lucky woman, Iskander had done her a favour by pinching Pinkie Aurangzeb from under Raza’s nose. ‘If Isky hadn’t been there maybe our hero’s Begum would have to console herself with children, because there would be no man to fill her bed.’ Shakil had spoken too loud, to gain the attention of the starlet Zehra, who was more interested in the over-bright looks she was getting from a certain Akbar Junejo, a well-known gambler and film producer; when Zehra moved away without bothering to make any excuses, Shakil was faced with the spectacle of a wide-eyed Bilquìs, who had just emerged on to the verandah after seeing her daughter into bed, and on whom the pregnancy was showing much too early … so who knows if that was the reason for Bilquìs’s stand, if she was just trying to transfer her own guilt on to the shoulders of a husband whose probity was now also the sub
ject of gossip? – Anyway, what happened was this: after it became clear to the guests that Omar Khayyam’s words had been heard and understood by the woman who stood blazing on the evening verandah, a silence fell, and a stillness which reduced the party to a tableau of fear, and into that stillness Bilquìs Hyder shrieked her husband’s name.
It must not be forgotten that she was a woman to whom the dupatta of womanly honour had clung even when the rest of her clothing had been torn off her body; not a woman to turn a deaf ear to public slanders. Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa stared wordlessly at each other while Bilquìs pointed a long-nailed index finger at the heart of Omar Khayyam Shakil.
‘You hear that man, husband? Hear what shame he is making for me.’
O, the hush, the muteness, like a cloud that obscured the horizon! Even the owls forbore to screech.
Raza Hyder came to attention, because once the afrit of honour has been summoned from its sleep, it will not depart until satisfied. ‘Iskander,’ Raza said, ‘I will not fight inside your house.’ Then he did a strange and a wild thing. He marched off the verandah, entered the stables, returned with a wooden stake, a mallet and a length of good stout rope. The stake was driven into the rock-hard earth; and then Colonel Hyder, future President, tethered himself to it by the ankle and hurled the mallet away.
‘Here I stand,’ he shouted, ‘let the one who slanders my honour come out and find me.’ And there, all night long, he remained; because Omar Khayyam Shakil rushed indoors, to faint of alcohol and fright.
Hyder like a bull paced in circles, the rope a radius stretching taut from ankle to stake. The night thickened; the guests, embarrassed, drifted away to bed. But Isky Harappa stayed on the verandah, knowing that although the folly had been the fat man’s, the true quarrel stood between the Colonel and himself. The starlet Zehra, on her way to a bed which it would be unforgivably loose-tongued of me to suggest was already occupied – so I shall say nothing at all on the subject – offered her host a warning. ‘Don’t go getting any stupid ideas, Isky darling, you hear? Don’t you dare go out there. He’s a soldier, look at him, like a tank, he’ll kill you for sure. Just let him cool off, O.K.?’ But Rani Harappa gave her husband no advice. (‘You see, Arjumand,’ she told her daughter, years later, ‘I recall your daddy when he was too mousey to take his medicine like a man.’)
How it ended: badly, as it had to. Just before dawn. You can understand: Raza had been awake all night, stamping in the circle of his pride, his eyes red with rage and fatigue. Red eyes don’t see clearly – and the light was poor – and who sees servants coming, anyway? – what I’m trying to say is that old Gulbaba woke early and walked across the yard with a brass lotah jug, on his way to ablute before saying his prayers; and, seeing Colonel Hyder tied to a stake, crept up behind him to ask, sir, what are you doing, will it not be better if you come …? Old servants take liberties. It is the privilege of their years. But Raza, sleep-deafened, heard only steps, a voice; felt a tap on his shoulder; swung round; and with one terrible blow, felled Gulbaba like a twig. The violence loosened something inside the old man; let us call it life, because within a month old Gul was dead, with a confused expression on his face, like a man who knows he has mislaid an important possession and can’t remember what it is.
In the aftermath of that murderous punch Bilquìs relented, emerging from the shadow of the house to persuade Raza to unhitch himself from his post. ‘The poor girl, Raza, don’t make her see this thing.’ And when Raza came back to the verandah, Iskander Harappa, himself unslept and unshaven, offered his arms in embrace, and Raza, with considerable grace, hugged Isky, shoulder against shoulder, allowing their necks to meet, as the saying goes.
When Rani Harappa emerged from her boudoir the next day to say goodbye to her husband, Iskander went pale at the sight of the shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders, a completed shawl as delicately worked as anything made by the craftswomen of Aansu, a masterpiece amidst whose minuscule arabesques a thousand and one stories had been portrayed, so artfully that it seemed as though horsemen were galloping along her collarbone, while tiny birds flew along the soft meridian of her spine. ‘Good-bye, Iskander,’ she told him, ‘and do not forget that the love of some women is not blind.’
Well, well, friendship is a bad word for the thing between Raza and Iskander, but for a long time after the incident of the stake it was the word they both used. Sometimes the good words can’t be found.
She has always wanted to be a queen, but now that Raza Hyder is at last a sort of prince the ambition has gone sour on her lips. A second baby has been born, six weeks early, but Raza has uttered no word of suspicion. Another daughter, but he hasn’t complained about that either, saying only that it is quite proper that the first should be a boy and the second a girl, so one must not blame the new arrival for her elder sister’s mistake. The girl has been named Naveed, that is Good News, and she is a model baby. But the mother has been damaged by this birth. Something has been torn inside, and the medical opinion is that she must have no more children. Raza Hyder will never have a son. He has spoken, just once, of the boy with field-glasses at the window of the witches’ house, but this subject, too, has been closed. He is withdrawing from her down the corridors of his mind, closing the doors behind him. Sindbad Mengal, Mohenjo, love: all these doors are closed. She sleeps alone, so that her old fears have her at their mercy, and it is in these days that she begins to be afraid of the hot afternoon wind that flows so fiercely out of her past.
Martial law has been declared. Raza has arrested Chief Minister Gichki and been appointed administrator of the region. He has moved into the Ministerial residence with his wife and children, abandoning to its memories that cracking hotel in which the last trained monkey has taken to wandering listlessly amidst the dying palms of the dining hall while ageing musicians scratch at their rotting fiddles for an audience of empty tables. She does not see much of Raza these days. He has work to do. The gas pipeline is progressing well, and now that Gichki is out of the way a programme of making examples of arrested tribals has been inaugurated. She fears that the bodies of hanged men will turn the citizens of Q. against her husband, but she does not say this to him. He is taking a firm line, and Maulana Dawood gives him all the advice he needs.
The last time I visited Pakistan, I was told this joke. God came down to Pakistan to see how things were going. He asked General Ayub Khan why the place was in such a mess. Ayub replied: ‘It’s these no-good corrupt civilians, sir. Just get rid of them and leave the rest to me.’ So God eliminated the politicos. After a while, He returned; things were even worse than before. This time He asked Yahya Khan for an explanation. Yahya blamed Ayub, his sons and their hangers-on for the troubles. ‘Do the needful,’ Yahya begged, ‘and I’ll clean the place up good and proper.’ So God’s thunderbolts wiped out Ayub. On His third visit, He found a catastrophe, so He agreed with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that democracy must return. He turned Yahya into a cockroach and swept him under a carpet; but, a few years later, he noticed the situation was still pretty awful. He went to General Zia and offered him supreme power: on one condition. ‘Anything, God,’ the General replied, ‘You name it.’ So God said, ‘Answer me one question and I’ll flatten Bhutto for you like a chapati.’ Zia said: ‘Fire away.’ So God whispered in his ear: ‘Look, I do all these things for this country, but what I don’t understand is: why don’t people seem to love me any more?’
It seems clear that the President of Pakistan managed to give God a satisfactory answer. I wonder what it was.
III
SHAME, GOOD NEWS AND THE VIRGIN
7
BLUSHING
Not so long ago, in the East End of London, a Pakistani father murdered his only child, a daughter, because by making love to a white boy she had brought such dishonour upon her family that only her blood could wash away the stain. The tragedy was intensified by the father’s enormous and obvious love for his butchered child, and by the beleaguered reluctance of his friends and
relatives (all ‘Asians’, to use the confusing term of these trying days) to condemn his actions. Sorrowing, they told radio microphones and television cameras that they understood the man’s point of view, and went on supporting him even when it turned out that the girl had never actually ‘gone all the way’ with her boyfriend. The story appalled me when I heard it, appalled me in a fairly obvious way. I had recently become a father myself and was therefore newly capable of estimating how colossal a force would be required to make a man turn a knife-blade against his own flesh and blood. But even more appalling was my realization that, like the interviewed friends etc., I, too, found myself understanding the killer. The news did not seem alien to me. We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride. (And not only men. I have since heard of a case in which a woman committed the identical crime for identical reasons.) Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
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